Diplomacy
Oral History Profile of an American Diplomat Instructions: Please go to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and teaching website: www.adst.org. Peruse the site to get a sense of what it includes, how it is organized, etc. Your task is to select one diplomat from among the many who are profiled. Please present a short 2-3 report on the person you selected. You might feel overwhelmed by the number of choices. Luckily, there are several ways to filter the interviews. One technique is to find a country that interests you (Greece) and then find a diplomat who served there. Another option would be to find someone famous or someone you’ve heard of. A third selection technique is to focus on a policy issue and find someone whose work intersected with it. If you are interested in race, ethnicity or gender, you will find some fascinating (and disturbing) material here. The number of African-American foreign service officers is small, as is the number of other minorities. A few with amazing stories are Ralph Bunche and Terence Todman, and Edward J. Perkins. Women foreign service officers were forced to resign if they got married, — all the way up until 1979. Prudence Bushnell has one of the most riveting stories – she was ambassador to Kenya during the embassy bombing. Make structure presentation around these points: 1. Please offer some introductory comments with essential details – name, dates of service, postings, and some basic biographic information about the person. 2. Look for a crisis in this person’s career. Was it an external crisis (coups, assassinations, floods, earthquakes); or an internal crisis such as the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, a policy disagreement, trouble with the boss, etc.? 3. How did the person handle dissent and disagreement? 4. How far through the ranks did the person rise? If he/she didn’t make ambassador, why not? What, about the career, was hard for this person? Did he/she have a family? 5. What seemed to account for the person’s success? 6. What major U.S. foreign policy events can you tie to this person’s career? 7. Your final thoughts about the person – someone you liked? Would like to work with? Considerations: The idea behind this assignment is to work with primary source material and to understand the unique attributes of oral histories. These are an increasingly important source of data in many professions, and they can be a rich vein for many kinds of qualitative research. Nonetheless, oral histories do have some limitations. Usually these are done at the end of one’s career. Memories tend to be sharper on recent events than on those in the distant past, yet often those are precisely the moments that are most interesting. There is also a tendency for sources to be self-serving – there is no one to corroborate the information given by the single source – the narrator. Time also tends to smooth over sharp disagreements and quarrels, but not always. Consider, also the role of the questioner. In this case, these are younger diplomats posing the questions, and they are usually very deferential. Their questions are usually prompts to continue the story, rather than a more active and engaged reportorial challenge. Do you think this style of interviewing is useful in some cases, or would be more interesting if there was more creative tension between the questioner an the respondent? Choose one individual who appeals to you (area of expertise? hometown? era? etc) and prepare a short paper (2-3 pages). Please focus on what made this person such a good diplomat. Try to make him/her come alive. If you would like to choose a diplomat from the country you will choose for other assignments that is fine.
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